Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 664

The Climate Crisis and the favela

*People who are into the joys of informal semilegal living need to bear this sort of thing in mind. Dharavi in Mumbai floods just like this Rio slum floods — for different geographical reasons, but identical political ones: no proper drainage because there's no proper utilities of any kind in the informal slum areas.

*Slums do have a much lighter footprint than most formal city areas. However: you know how "green" these drowned favela guys are? They're REAL green now, because graves have...

The computational aesthetics scene

*Well, this is pretty much everybody who's anybody in that racket, and now you know where to go if you need to learn more about this.

http://formandcode.com/

Aaron Koblin, Aaron Siegel, Alex Dragulescu, Alexander Calder, Andy Lomas, Aranda/Lasch (Benjamin Aranda, Chris Lasch, Clay Coffey), ART+COM, Arup, Atari, Ben F. Laposky, Ben Fry, Ben Shneiderman, Bill Cheswick, Bridget Riley, Catalogtree, Charles A. Csuri, Cornelia Sollfrank, Cory Arcangel, David Dessens, David Em, David Small, Daniel...

Showtime: Pixels

*I'm in Belgrade, and the show must go on.

Augmented Reality: open-source video projection tools

*You never know when the likes of this might come in handy. Via @mariuswatz

http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/resources/video-projection-tools/

Indian religious muckraking

*This development may be of some small consolation to the Catholic Church this season. "Guru centipedes." They're non-denominational.

*You have to wonder how long it will take net-assisted sex scandals to reach the Long Tail of minor religions like Zoroastrianism and Falun Gong.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100402/sex-india-gurus

(…)

"India has long held a thrall in the Western mind as a land of wandering fakirs and saffron-robed holy men with matted hair. In this birthplace of...

Latest DOORS OF PERCEPTION

*"You will need to do a lot more than just plug a sensor into a tree and get it

to tweet!" *Yeah, well, okay, I guess so

Doors of Perception Report

by John Thackara

Requiem for a species - and for lunch

April 2010

This free monthly newsletter starts conversations on issues to do

with design for resilience, and announces Doors of Perception events.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://www.doorsofperception.com/mail...

Back issues: http://www.doorsofperception.com/mail...

***...

Knit bombs

*Textile art as graffiti.

http://www.examiner.com/x-25213-Austin-Knitting-Examiner~y2010m2d26-Knit-bombs-hit-Austin-streets

http://yarnbombing.com/

http://www.artyarn.blogspot.com/

STEALTH: Future Past Cities

*I can't go to this event, but it sure sounds like it would be up my various Belgrade and Austin alleys.

Join us for the next installment of CMPBS's 10 in 10 series

Stealth

Future Past Cities:

10 years of projects between art, architecture, & the city

Following collaboration since 1996, in the year 2000 ANA DZOKIC and MARC NEELEN initiated STEALTH, a practice based between Rotterdam and Belgrade - in which shifts of perspectives between urban research, visual arts, spatial intervention and...

Spime Watch: flaws in spime theory

*A theory that's not falsifiable is too vague to be wrong. So how would you know that "spimes" were wrongheaded? Rather a large number of ways.

Bruce Sterling "Shaping Things" (Lift09 France EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

David Cameron at TED

*Red Toryism, social networking, and an adviser claque of behavioral economics gurus. "The pre-bureaucratic age, the bureaucratic age, and the post-bureaucratic age."

*What can nation-states do when they are scarily bankrupt? Let Them Eat Networks. Replace wealth with denser sociality. Web 2.0 in power. Political crowdsourcing, no business model. May sound weird, but what else is there?

*I dunno if this Cameron guy's gonna get elected or not, but this is the avant-garde of...